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Abstract
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The study of racial stigma in The Bluest Eye remains critically urgent—not as a historical artifact, but as a literary laboratory for understanding how systemic devaluation reshapes identity from within. While Erving Goffman’s foundational work defines stigma as a “gap between virtual and actual social identity” that compels the stigmatized to engage in perpetual “information management” (Stigma 5, 65), Morrison’s novel demonstrates how this process becomes ontological under anti-Blackness. Pecola’s internalized self-annihilation—her yearning for blue eyes, her dissociation, her erasure—exemplifies what Goffman terms the “phantom acceptance”: a defensive illusion wherein validation is fabricated in the absence of real recognition (Stigma 82). This study matters because it reveals how Morrison does not merely depict stigma, but enacts its mechanics through narrative form, character psychology, and communal dynamics—offering a model for reading stigma as sociological process, not psychological fate.
Goffman insists that stigma is collectively sustained, not merely imposed from above (Stigma 12); Morrison powerfully dramatizes this insight through the Breedloves’ neighbors, Pauline’s internalized hierarchy, and even Claudia’s retrospective guilt: “we were only buying her a little time” (Morrison 206). This horizontal enforcement—what Sharpe names “the hold,” a space where care and violence coexist under anti-Blackness (In the Wake 24)—complicates moral binaries and demands a structural, rather than individual, account of complicity. As Davis notes, “Stigma is not an attribute, but a relationship—a dynamic of power that structures visibility and legitimacy” (Davis 33); Morrison’s novel makes that relationship visible, tracing how it infiltrates family, school, church, and selfhood.
Moreover, the novel anticipates contemporary concerns about embodied stigma—not through technological analogies, but through visceral representation. Pecola’s whispered plea, “Please God… mak
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